Developers Earning 4 Times on iOS Than on Android, 7/10 Apps Are Designed For iOS

An apple keeps a doctor away. This is precisely what app developers are thinking these days. An Apple App a day keeps them away from Android. According a report by Flurry, an advertisement and analytical company, 70% apps made in Q1 of 2012 were developed for iOS, whereas Android apps stack up to just 31%.

The firm measures the ‘new project starts’ by recording how many developers are downloading and implementing its analytics SDK in order to fire up a new project. Because developers normally integrate analytics some time before launching apps, these numbers are actually good projections of where new products are going to be launched.

There are strong fundamental reasons why devs choose iOS over Android. To start with, it’s the consistency in product life-cycle. Apple follows a strict one year policy for its devices. Moreover all the newer generation devices carry the same screen size. This really helps the devs to optimise their apps so that run with almost same performance on older devices as well. Compare this to Android market, and the picture is really depressing. Manufacturers are selling Android enabled phones in all shapes and sizes in every possible permutation combination of hardware specs so as to penetrate the market. Thus they have different screen sizes to different processors. Thus the apps don’t provide the same experience on different devices.

Second reason that I can point out is the software fragmentation. More than 70% of Android devices currently in the market are on Gingerbread, an OS which released a year back. According to Flurry’s Google’s tablet optimised OS, Froyo, has more penetration than both Ice-cream Sandwich and Honeycomb combined. This restricts the developers from optimising their apps. They can’t use the new features and conventions available on the new devices. But when we see iDevices, the picture is a beautiful one. More than 75% devices are on the new platform i.e iOS 5 released just this year. The number is 75% because the older generation iPhones like the iPhone 3G is not supported. This goes on to show that almost every Apple user is using the latest software. This helps the developers to fully utilise the new additions made to the OS.

Adding to above the reasons Flurry’s believes that iOS developers earn 4x Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android.Flurry’s tracking uses data from 70K companies across 185K mobile apps and 1.2B end-user sessions across 100M devices. That’s 36B sessions across half a billion devices a month.